Out of Tune (11 page)

Madame Carrard continues: “His stay in England was a complete failure. He was no good, he missed his lessons. He missed history
lessons and theory lessons and he was just lost. I can’t understand why his father let him go at all.”

Nevertheless, my father reconciled himself to the fact that David was going. After the argument, David stayed with Phillip
and Edna Luber-Smith for a short while before he left for England. My parents were not angry with him for doing this. They
realized that on reaching adulthood children sometimes need to put distance between themselves and their family, as indeed
I had already done when I went to Melbourne. David made regular visits back home while he was staying at the Luber-Smiths’
and my parents would give him some fruit, some money, or whatever he needed.

In recalling David’s stay with her, Mrs. Luber-Smith remembered David’s untidiness; how he would eat with his fingers rather
than a knife and fork; and how he preferred to eat at the piano, which he was loath to leave, rather than at the table.

Since the original organizers refused to cancel their concert, my father had to drop his plans to hold one at the Capitol
Theater. The concert organized by the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia went ahead on May 17, 1966, two days before
David’s nineteenth birthday, although the word “charity” was dropped from the program.

In addition to the money raised from the concert, David received a grant from the university music department toward his fare,
tuition, fees, and living expenses. Another Jewish charitable organization, the Phineas Seeligson Trust, provided David with
the clothes he needed for London, including a tailored suit, an overcoat, and various pairs of smart shoes. (David only won
a scholarship from the Royal College of Music three years into his course, which gave him the right to study for a fourth
year.)

The program for David’s farewell concert read as follows:

RECITAL

by

DAVID HELFGOTT

PIANIST

GOVERNMENT HOUSE BALLROOM

PERTH

Tuesday, 17th May, 1966

at 8 p.m.

in the presence of His Excellency the Governor,

Sir Douglas Kendrew

and Lady Kendrew

Arranged by

The National Council of Jewish Women of Australia
,

Perth section

The program notes read as follows:

“DAVID HELFGOTT

Tonight’s concert is the latest milestone in the career of nineteen-year-old David Helfgott who will soon be leaving to study
at the Royal College of Music, London. He has recently been awarded an overseas bursary by the Music Council of W.A., a scholarship
by the Music Examinations Board of the University of Western Australia and a grant from the Phineas Seeligson Trust of Perth.

David is well-known to Perth audiences for his many performances at concerts and music festivals, and on radio and TV. He
received his first piano lessons at the age of five from his father. At nine he played a Chopin Polonaise at a country music
festival and at twelve he entered the ABC Concerto competition for the first time, playing the Bach D Minor Concerto. The
following year he was selected as a State Finalist and gained second place with the Ravel G Minor Concerto. The succeeding
three years saw him State winner, first with the Mozart C Minor Concerto, then with the Liszt E-flat Major, and finally at
the age of seventeen with the Rachmaninoff D Minor Concerto.

David holds both Associate and Licentiate certificates of the AMEB and won the Vincent Memorial prize for the best results
in Associate with 184 marks out of a possible 200. Visiting celebrities for whom he has played and who have predicted a brilliant
future for him include Julius Katchen, Louis Kentner, Isaac Stern, Gina Bachauer, Abbey Simon, Tamas Vasary, and Daniel Barenboim.
David is at present studying with Mme. Alice Carrard.”

That evening, following the National Anthem, David performed works by Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Mussorgsky.
The packed hall gave him a standing ovation. It was a true moment of glory and an appropriate musical send-off.

Three months later, on August 14, David set sail from Fremantle for London on the
Himalaya,
which would be making a brief stop in Egypt before arriving in London a month later. David’s dreams of leaving Australia
were finally being realized. As he set sail with both excitement and trepidation, none of us could know what triumphs and
disasters awaited him.

D
avid lived in London for four years, from September 1966 to August 1970. Throughout this time relations between father and
son remained close. The suggestion made in
Shine
that there was a total breakdown in communication is preposterous; they wrote to each other regularly. David also wrote to
my mother and to all his siblings—and we all wrote back. David’s letters were never sent back unopened by my father marked
“Return to Sender,” as is shown in the film. Nor did my father burn his collection of press clippings about David. David himself
now has the originals—I borrowed them and made photocopies in the 1980s.

The correspondence between David and my father reveals enormous love and affection. The letters begin along the lines of “Dear
Dad, it was super to get your letter; it made me very happy” (letter of November 11, 1969), and end with such expressions
of unqualified love as “Cheerio for now, Dad, all my love and affection, your loving son, David,” or “From the bottom of my
heart, all my love and affection, David.”

When my father died in 1975, he was living with David, Leslie, Louise, and my mother in the house that Leslie had bought in
South Perth in 1971. He left to Leslie the letters that David wrote from London. The publication in full of these letters,
in David’s own handwriting, would establish once and for all that
Shine
is based on lies. Yet they cannot be published for one reason: the obstructive attitude of David’s second wife, Gillian.

Gillian Murray, a divorcee, first met David in 1983, eight years after my father passed away. She married David a year later.
She is one of the principal sources for
Shine
, collaborating closely with Scott Hicks throughout his “ten-year odyssey.” She provided him with a great deal of information,
and even went so far as to be present on the set during the filming of some scenes.

Her spin-off book of the film,
Love You to Bits and Pieces,
described on its front cover as “The true story that inspired the movie Shine,” has become an international best-seller.
In it, she not only repeats many of the falsehoods told in
Shine,
but adds some new ones of her own. She seems happy to vilify my father even though she never met him. Either she defames
him directly or she does so by quoting what she claims David has said. However, I believe it is highly doubtful that David
actually spoke the words attributed to him; and if he did, I do not believe these genuinely represent his own feelings. David,
who after years of psychiatric treatment, is still on constant medication, remains childlike, easy to manipulate, and heavily
under Gillian’s influence. (Gillian herself even admits at one point in her book that David is “extremely malleable material.”)

Here are a few examples of the things said about my father in
Love You to Bits and Pieces:

• “Peter Helfgott was a helpless, hopeless, sickly father who could do nothing for his son but provide him with a rickety piano
  and a homemade stool.”
  
• “Peter Helfgott once told his son that he would one day end up ‘dead in the gutter.’”
  
• “Father belted me to the living daylights, he did.” (According to Gillian this is David’s recollection of the boat trip to
  Perth in 1953, when he was aged six.)
  
• “Father burned them all [the letters], set them on fire,” Gillian quotes David as supposedly saying. (These particular letters
  weren’t actually written by David to Peter, but are rather letters David had saved from a close friend. Nevertheless this
  passage certainly suggests my father is the kind of person who would burn someone else’s letters.)
  

In reading these completely fictional statements one soon begins to understand where Hicks found his inspiration for
Shine.
There was, of course, no burning of letters or any other material in the Helfgott household by my father or anyone else.
This is the kind of thing the Nazis did.

Yet Gillian’s book, in a manner reminiscent of the movie that preceded it, purports to be an “honest” account of David Helfgott’s
life.
Love You to Bits and Pieces
is, as I write this, still on the best-seller list in a number of countries—which is no doubt the reason why Gillian is now
doing her utmost to prevent the publication of David’s letters.

Perhaps unaware that copies of the letters still existed at the time she was supplying Hicks with information for
Shine,
Gillian has now panicked. Since learning from an Australian radio program that my brother Leslie had them, she has utilized
every means at her disposal to ensure that the true facts be suppressed. First, she persuaded my still mentally fragile brother
to sign over to her the copyright of the letters he wrote to his father. Then, in February 1997, she instructed her lawyers
to write an extremely hostile letter to Leslie threatening legal action and seeking damages for breach of copyright should
we reprint them, warning ominously of “severe sanctions for noncompliance.”

International copyright law dictates that while letters themselves are the property of the recipient, who can pass them on
to whomever he likes (in this case Leslie), the copyright of the content of a letter remains with the writer. This somewhat
strange dichotomy in the area of legal rights means that it is not technically permissible for the owner of a letter to republish
it without permission from the copyright holder, in this case Gillian. Since Gillian has prevented their publication, legally
we are able only to paraphrase these letters or quote short extracts from them.

I need hardly say that the entire Helfgott family is shocked by Gillian’s threats—and bewildered by her unilateral decision
to communicate with her family through her lawyers.

If, as Gillian claims, she wants to give an “honest” account of David’s life, it is quite beyond me why she has forbidden
Leslie and me to reprint letters that show only warmth between David and his father, letters that state: “Dad, I miss you
and Mum terribly, I wish you could come over”; and “I only wish you and the family could come over to London. I do miss you
and Mum very much”; and “From the bottom of my heart I send you all my love and affection for your 25th wedding anniversary
and I’m always thinking of you!” And so on.

It is in these letters that the truth can be found, not in
Love You to Bits and Pieces.

U
pon arrival at the Royal College of Music, David— even given the high standard of his fellow students—was judged to be one
of the top pupils. He was allocated a grade 4B out of a maximum grade of 5.

The Royal College is one of the world’s great conservatories and a wonderful place to study. It was founded in 1883 by royal
charter under the presidency of the then Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). In 1894 it moved from its premises in Kensington
Gore to a magnificent Victorian red-brick building on Prince Consort Road, on the southern edge of Hyde Park in London’s fashionable
Kensington district, and just a few steps away from the Royal Albert Hall.

Among its former pupils, who developed their skills in its resonant and intimate practice rooms, are Benjamin Britten, Barry
Douglas, John Lill, Leopold Stokowski, Joan Sutherland, and Michael Tippett. Students need only browse among the college’s
valuable collection of antique musical instruments and portraits to gain a sense of its historical importance.

Although David’s years in London ended in tragedy, England’s capital city was also the scene of a number of his outstanding
successes. In 1967, he won first prize for piano in grade 4. In 1968, he won the Marmaduke Barton Prize and the Hopkinson
Silver Medal, awarded by the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society, for his performance of Beethoven’s D Minor “Tempest” Sonata,
Balakirev’s “Islamey,” and Chopin’s Etude op. 25, no. 11. The medal was presented to him the following year by Queen Elizabeth,
the Queen Mother. News of David’s accolade traveled back to Perth and a photograph of David, head bowed as he meets the Queen
Mother, appeared in the local Perth newspapers.